How to ass-rape a guitar

Loosely inspired by chatting with @chaos_darling on Twitter earlier, who described hearing a neighbor’s wretched guitar playing that sounded like the guitar was being anally raped.

Me, I have a sick and twisted mind that likes to imagine things literally, so this is what went through my mind:

First, you want to have adequate mic placements. We’re making industrial and noise here and why waste a good opportunity to capture screams of pain from inanimate objects. Mic things up first, and plug the guitar into your favorite amp. You might want to isolate the amp so as to minimize the bleed into your ambient mics and your close mics.

Then, the first problem is that guitars don’t have holes. Or if they do, they’re too big to be useful. I assume we’re using a solid body electric here, it’s more fun that way – although I’ll grant that all the horrible [oops, accidentlaly wrote “horriBILE” – Freudian slip!] folk music created on acoustics means they likely have something like this coming to ’em.

So, you need a big powerful drill with a giant bit wide enough for your purposes. You might want to go for a masonry drill – not technically necessary but they do hammer in and out along with the spinning motion. Whatever you’re into.

Make sure the DAW of your choice is running on the tracks so you capture it all, hit record and have at it.

You should get some good squealing noise samples, and possibly some buzzing and whatnot if you hit the pick-ups. Which you probably want to avoid, live electricity and all, but hey, some people are into that sort of sparking.

Now that you have your entryway done, lube as desired and do as you will, grabbing and yanking at the strings as you go. Or using the drill across the strings until they break. Or both at the same time. Whatever.

Of course, it should be noted that I’m a synth player and don’t know a damn thing about what sorts of noises a guitar would actually make under these circumstances, but I reckon it’s more interesting than what the guitar was doing before.